About Me

Sitting at the intersection of Facilitation, User Experience, Innovation & Design, I have spent the better part of the last 20 years working with organizations to define, design and develop strategies or solutions to fit their organization’s challenges and then implement them. I’ve worked with organizations from small sole-proprietorships up to some of the largest organizations within Canada, across a broad range of industries.

I currently lead Technology Experience Strategy where I'm helping redefine how we deliver IT services & technologies to employees at a major Canadian bank, a proud father of two boys and an avid photographer.

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Category: Videos

Last weekend I was invited to come and facilitate at the Visual Thinking and Literacy Conference in Birmingham, MI. This is the second year the conference has run – it’s a neat little event that draws a mix of people from the education & business worlds (as well as a hand full of students too).

In addition to my session (on brainstorming tools & techniques) I was also invited to participate in a live taping of The Forge, a monthly video show/podcast put together by Matt Pierce at Techsmith. The show was taped in two segments – the first a panel discussion/debate on paper vs. digital with my friends and visual thinking masters Jamie Nast, Karl Gude and Brandy Agerbeck. The second part was a one-on-one interview with me that ranged form “What do you do?” to my favorite tools, techniques and my thoughts on the paper vs. digital debate.

I’ve embedded the show below – the whole thing is worth watching. If you want to jump to my interview it starts around 16:05 in.

A few weeks ago I came across a video on Tumblr entitled “The Most Useless Machine Ever” – as soon as I saw it I knew I had to have one, and thankfully the guy who posted the video, “SaskView” also posted an Instructables page with instructions for the circuit and assembly. This struck me as a perfect basic electronics project to take on with my son, Oliver.

The finished product

Assembly & Tweaks

Assembly took place over a couple of weekends as I got my rusty soldering skills back in shape and finally learned how to read circuit diagrams properly. In the end, we fell back to a simplified circuit (that someone had posted in the comments of the Instructable) that turned it from a relatively complex circuit (for my current skill level) to a basic two-switch, one-motor affair. We did have to lobotomize the servo motor so it was free spinning & wired directly to power (basically turning it into a plain old motor”) but I don’t plan on pulling this apart so I wasn’t too worried about it.

It was a fun little project and surprisingly, it never gets old, even a week later I can’t help but flick the switch whenever I walk by it :)

As you may recall, last month I spoke at Ignite Toronto 2. I’m happy to report that the video is finally up and I’ve embedded it below:

(those reading in feedreaders may need to click through to the post to see video)

Unfortunately the move from my PC to the presenting Mac’s software garbled a couple of slides, but it’s not the end of the world.

I would love to hear your thoughts and comments – You can also check out my original post about this evening to see the slide deck in it’s non-mutilated form as well as the full deck from my FITC talk, which this ignite was based on.

I got the urge to start mucking about with videos again over the holidays… embedded below are a couple of short videos I put together with some of my pics from last year:

1. Monster Jam

Shot at the Monster Truck show last year in Toronto at the Rogers Centre…

2. Wiarton Hockey

Erin’s younger cousin’s hockey team were playing in a tournament near us so we went to watch the game. The game ended up being their first win of the season so it was a fun one to watch.

I plan on doing a few more just to keep the creative juices flowing, and considering I took over 10,000 pictures last year there’s more than enough material to work with!

Check out my PhotoblogIf you haven’t recently, be sure to swing by my Photo blog at http://photography.ryancoleman.ca it’s updated daily and, if I may say so myself, is on a pretty good roll right now images wise…